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Month: April 2017

While assuming I would make Old Lusitania my home, I stopped working on it for about a month to build out a witch farm. I’d never done that, and still didn’t have all the end game stuff that might make doing it go super fast (beacons, full enchanted everything), but it was a fun project. I learned a lot, and it’s really satisfying to see the glowstone, redstone, and gunpowder roll in during a good AFK session.

What’s been done so far is the basic witch farm itself, a floating platform above to keep it dark, where you can AFK, and where the drops are brought to for storage. Additionally, I’ve created a decorated hallway in the nether from our main nether hallway that leads to the nether portal to the witch farm.

The surface area around the farm is lit up and some of it has been cleared away. Finally, most, but not all, of the caving has been done to ensure that only witches can spawn when you stand on the AFK platform.

Though the witch farm is still a work in progress, it is operational. There is still some caving that can be done to increase rates, but I think they’re decent at the moment. The bigger undone work is a bunch of decoration I’d like to do. I’d like to surround the farm itself in a large haunted house structure, primarily lit up with redstone torches, and properly decorated to be creepy. Additionally, the floating island where you AFK is just a simple platform right now. But eventually it will be a proper floating island, with vines growing down the sides, a potion brewing setup, a much larger storage area, etc.

For the last couple days I’ve been putting Old Lusitania into a good state for me to abandon it. That meant packing up all my gear – yay for shulker boxes! It also meant building a real house there for Snowball to live in. Snowball is the zombie pigman that will be the caretaker for Old Lusitania until another player decides to take ownership of the area.

As caretaker, Snowball is guarding his two prisoners, a couple villagers he has captured. He lives in a small house with a bed, and a vertical mineshaft down to a skeleton farm and an abandoned mineshaft. Down at the skeleton farm he’s also built a fishing farm and a small crop farm. Around the other side of the plateau is a tree farm, pumpkin farm, chicken farm, and a larger mineshaft.

On Snowball’s nightstand is a journal that he’s kept detailing the building progress he’s made and his current ennui in a boring life. It also contains an invitation for another to take ownership of the land and remake it as their own.

Old Lusitania

Before I say which of the prospective locations I’m settling on, there was more to my search than just looking at the four locations I documented. Before that, I carefully examined all of the savannas currently revealed on the chicken pie craft map. Back when the server first kicked off I had explored some of those and chose what will soon be Old Lusitania.

Then, after getting distracted by the witch farm and then returning to Old Lusitania, I decided it was time to move. The main concerns I have with Old Lusitania is that it is a bit too small, a bit too close to other players (I don’t want to crowd them or be crowded later in the game), and lacked some structure that I feel will help (i.e. just a single plateau, not much else going on). That said, there are some good things about it. I found a skeleton spawner and an abandoned mineshaft in my initial mining there. Until Old Lusitania is claimed by another player I may return occasionally to stock up on bonemeal.

Before checking out the four prospective locations, I checked out new savannas that had been revealed by player exploration on the map, and did some exploring of my own. Besides the four I documented, there were two or three others that I looked at and took screenshots of, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth writing up my thoughts about them. They were the wrong shape, size, or bordered biomes I didn’t want to deal with, or didn’t have good borders at all.

New Lusitania

All that said, I’ve settled on prospective location 1 as the site for New Lusitania. After choosing the sites to consider, but before exploring each one, I didn’t think site 1 was going to be the winner. It is close to Old Lusitania, and so I’d flown over it once or twice. Because of that familiarity, I assumed I knew what it would be like. And because I had no idea what the other locations were really like, my optimistic brain assumed they’d be awesome. And each one certainly had it’s strengths, but also weaknesses.

On exploring site 1 though, I took a closer look at the village, the lake, and the borders. All of those really stood out, as did the cool ravine on the north side. In the process of exploring all the sites, I was also reminded in my work life that I prefer taking existing systems and structures and improving them. Because of that, the village at site 1 became really important, as it will likely become the core of New Lusitania as I expand on it, remodel it, and use it as a foundation for all that will come later.

My fourth prospective location is intriguing, and different from the others in some important ways. Rather than north or south of spawn, it’s almost directly west. It’s not circular or triangular, but close to a rectangle that is taller than it is wide. As such, it’s narrower (east/west) than the other locations, but taller (north/south).

It also has 3 plateaus, rather than the two at each of the other locations.

Though I found no ravines in the area, the ground is pockmarked with cave openings. At first this seemed, pretty cool, as there would be a lot to explore, maybe a higher probability of dungeons. But it would also mean a lot of cleanup terraforming to make way for buildings.

There is a decent lake on the south side of the biome. There are also three rivers that all empty to the east. Two of those could be easily connected to form an inland harbor for New Lusitania, and the third provides a natural border with the deserts to the north.

The deserts to the west have no river border, but do back up to two of the plateaus, forming a kind of cliffside border.

To the south are some plains. This location has the best collection of horses and pigs of all the locations.

Overall, this location is more tempting than the third location. It may not beat out either of the first two, however, due to the large size, the overabundance of caves, and large distance to any villages. The surrounding areas have the same basic resources as the first location: deserts, plains, and further out a mega taiga and a mushroom island.

Ok, so I had high hopes for my third prospective location for New Lusitania. It’s a single island, completely savanna. In a lot of ways, that’s ideal. It appears there is only one within reasonable distance on the chicken pie craft server, so that’s a big plus for this location.

Like the other locations, it has a large plateau and a smaller one. It also has plenty of open flat areas for building the main parts of Lusitania. It’s definitely shaped differently than locations 1 and 2, which were both fairly circular. This location is more of an inverted triangle, with a nice bay or harbor on the north side.

The nearest land is more savanna and desert to the south, though in other directions there is a mesa and an ice spikes biome, so those are nice.

There are some things missing however. The only animal on the island is cows. There is no ravine, or village, or interesting lakes. No nearby guardian farms. I couldn’t quite get to the location in the nether, but I got close enough that I couldn’t see anything too special.

Finally, it’s fairly near the world border. I was also going to look at the savanna to the south as a fourth location, but the world border cuts through it, making it not even worth considering at this point. Besides the closeness, it also means it’s about as far as you can get from spawn, which means long trips to all of the community farms and locations, as well as very long hallways to decorate in the nether.

So, I highlighted prospective location 1 yesterday, and location 2 is very, very similar. It’s roughly the same size, not quite as far north, but much closer to the north hallway that cuts through the nether.

It also has two plateaus, one large and one small.

Though there is no acacia village, there is a desert village just to the south.

This savanna has the perfect mix of animals, with pigs and horses, plus a few cows and sheep. For this one, there are natural borders on the north, a river dividing it from the desert, and the southwest, another river dividing it from the forest. To the east and west are oceans, and to the south east is the desert. There are some nice resources nearby, with a mushroom island just out of sight to the north, and a guardian temple a little further away.

Additionally, this one also has a ravine, but on the south side of the savanna. Overall, it might be a tough choice between this one and location 1, just because they are so similar.

On the Chicken Pie Craft server, my plan is to build up a kingdom called New Lusitania in a savanna. The server is fairly new, just one month old. In that time I picked out an initial spot, but then got distracted building a witch farm for the server (still in progress, post coming). In the meantime, much more of the map has been explored, and many more savanna biomes have been discovered that might make even better locations than my first pick. So for the next week or so, I’m going to be exploring four to six potential locations, writing up my thoughts here, and then using what I learn to choose an official location for New Lusitania. When I make the move, I’ll officially call my current location Old Lusitania, leave some goodies for whoever comes along and decides to make it there home, and properly abandon it.

Because there can only be one New Lusitania, I’ll just be referring to the prospective locations by number.

Prospective Location 1

The first prospective location is a savanna biome with a rough radius of 150-175 blocks. Two rivers provide northern and southern borders, though the northern river doesn’t quite make it to the sea, so there will be some necessary terraforming to finish that off.

It features a savanna village that goes up the side of the large plateau in the middle of the biome.

A large lake on the western edge of the biome seems ripe with possibility.

Meanwhile the open fields on the eastern side lead down to the open sea, providing a great opportunity to flesh out a large community, complete with a seafaring industry.

The harbor that the southern river spills into is also ideal for docks. Additionally, there’s a pretty awesome ravine just north of the lake that may make a good initial mine, or could eventually become some proper dungeons.

On the nether side, it’s less than 200 blocks from the main north hallway that connects to the nether hub. Below it is some pretty cool nether terrain, not just an empty lava ocean, so I can put that to good use. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that there is a nether fortress nearby.

Overall, this looks like a great location. I suspect it will be one of the better ones I take a look at.

After contributing flat item frames to Quark, I took a closer look at the features in Iberia. Iberia is quite different from Quark, in that it changes the way you play Minecraft, rather than just adding stuff to it. I love playing with both Quark and Iberia, but I recognize that they are two different things.

That said, Iberia has one little feature that fits perfectly with Quark: Quick Armor Swapping. In Iberia, it’s there to make life with armor drawbacks more bearable. But on it’s own, it’s a great little convenience that makes armor stands much more enjoyable to use in Minecraft. So, I took a bit of time, added it to Quark, and it’s now available in the latest version. Enjoy!